July 16th, 2006 by 
gowest
It was time for round 4 or 5. I actually stopped counting how many overall layoffs there have been now. Fact is I am still employed and I am not sure if it would have been better to lay me off 2 months ago. The last time the severance packages carried a minimum of 60 days salary + Health Insurance. This time it seems like that the severance package was reduced to 30 days and Health Insurance will run out at the end of the month (roughly 2 weeks from now). This could mean that the going gets really tough now and that money is getting tight. Maybe the next time there is not enough money left to pay severance at all? Who knows? Overall - the fun is missing and we have not been busy lately at all. The people who were busy were actually doing the same things 2 or 3 times because it wasn’t done right the first time. That seems to be a common problem here. The slap a solution into production just to go back a couple of times and fix it because it was not done right and it was done with no planning at all.
Anyway - I think the taxman is still proud of me - I am still paying a shitload of taxes every month to keep the government going. 
By the way - if you know about a job opening for a Senior Windows Systems Engineer in the southern Denver Metro area (or via remote / work from home), let me know.
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July 14th, 2006 by gowest
Got up at 5.00 AM as every morning to go running as usual. “Oh, my gosh - I am turning blind.” was my first thought. Everything was so blurry. I even took my glasses that I never wear and things got even worse. I couldn’t see shit. No, the lights were turned on - that was not it. My blood pressure slowly came up to speed and oxygen was transported to my still sleeping brain. With every breath I was able to get a clearer thought of what was going on. “What did I do last night?” was flashing in front of my eyes like a movie. I saw me preparing everything for the night, but I did not see me doing a certain thing. No, I am not talking about sex. I am not very organized in many ways, but my morning and evening procedures are so standardized - it’s like a program.
Well, apparently the evening program must have crashed with a major Blue screen of death. There was a big piece missing from my memory. At work I would have talked about a memory leak. Here I found an easy term for it:
Lack of sleep
What had happened? Well, I wear contacts. To be more specific, I wear dailies - the contacts you just use one day and then trash ‘em. I had forgotten to take them out last night for whatever reason. My eyes were dry and things looked so blurry. I grabbed into my eyes and removed the contacts. Things still looked blurry, but when I went for my morning run things slowly improved. lol It’s not the first time I noticed that I do not function very well with a major lack of sleep. See, what a baby can do to you?!
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July 13th, 2006 by gowest
I am watching Santa for days now. Ever since my package was entered into the UPS (United Parcel Service) system I am watching it. Can’t wait for this package to arrive. I think I refreshed the page at least 10 times today. See what a new laptop computer from Dell makes you go through?
By the way - did you know that Christmas is just around the corner? Just 5.5 months left to go. Better get your shopping done soon.
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July 12th, 2006 by gowest
When working in Information Technology I consider staying up to date with current software critical. I keep track of software and operating system updates and make sure I upgrade fairly quick to have my environment secured and to avoid being hit by viruses or exploits.I recently listened to some other IT folks talking about the latest Microsoft patches that were released and almost fell of my chair laughing and swearing. I mean - I knew they were already behind. Lightyears behind to be exact. But the attitude of these so-called IT professionals just stunned me. Microsoft had announced end of support for certain products and patch levels and these so-called IT professionals had to question the Microsoft representative a couple of times as if this end of support would mean the end of the world to them. How can you work in IT and run into problems with the end of support time line of a Microsoft product? Nobody expects you to be cutting edge, but there are years in a lifecycle of a Microsoft product. Years!!! And these so-called IT professionals fail to plan for upgrades and patching and then struggle when Microsoft finally pulls the trigger?! That is just bad.
Don’t get me wrong. I know many companies are squeezing the last dollar out of a product they pay good money for. But Microsoft publishes end of lifecycle dates years in advance so that businesses can plan. An IT professional is doing a very bad job by not looking at those schedules every once in a while and to plan accordingly. The bad thing here is, that these so-called IT professionals are in charge of their environment and now everyone underneath has to follow their speed. By the way - I could see the Microsoft rep smiling and laughing about these so-called IT professionals, too. She even did me a favor when asking the question about how fast the normal patch installation turnaround time would be. First there was silence - a little too long. You could tell that there was no plan and no tools in place to get the environment patched in a timely fashion and the respondee made something up to not look like an idiot - again, a little too late. Happy patching.
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